Georgina suggests centralisation model cant work in Australia due to the power of the NSW and Qld.
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Slashed and burned: What's next for Australian rugby?
http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/u...ainty-loom-as-challenges-20170413-gvku4o.html
Australia's governance model is a legacy of the sport's amateur roots. Rugby grew out of communities in Queensland and NSW and there its power base still resides. Certainly the ARU holds tight to the national purse strings, doling out broadcast and Test match revenue to the state unions and professional clubs. But under the constitution it can do very little to change the fundamental structure of the game without the approval of the Queensland and NSW rugby unions, who are the game's major voting members.
The article also confirms some Force fans assertion of unfair distribution of player top up funding.
The whole institutional framework of Australian rugby belongs and in effect remains in the 1970s that that status is in significant part to blame for the parlous, mismanaged, woefully degraded and incompetently led state of the code in 2017.
The 'power base resides in NSW and Old'. That's because the ARU board members and the board members of those two State RU form a de facto alliance of perpetuated mutual back-scratching whereby they each agree to keep the other in place via their respective powers, in the case of the ARU its grant-giving powers, in respect of the State RUs these bodies continually voting for the retention of ARU board members on the ARU board as the implicit quid pro quo.
This defines serious, institutionalised conflict of interest abnormalities and derivatively negative incestuous culture-building.
The lack of responsible resolution of these abnormalities has led to the mutually convenient non-confrontation of the chronic mutual non-performance of core leadership duties by the ARU and the State RUs in the interests of the broader rugby community.
The results of this structural delinquency are startlingly obvious today.
The conflict of interest abnormalities are blindingly obvious: the ARU in effect by its grant powers from Super XX, Wallaby and WorldRugby income could easily completely control and reform the State RUs (as their solvency totally and utterly depends upon the ARU's grants and always has) but it perpetuates the convenient factual and legal fantasy that these RUs are 'independent entities' when they are no such thing and never will be. Clyne even called them this fallacious untruth last week and stated (paraphrasing) 'this (independent entity status of the State RUs) adds real complications to how we run the code'.
FFS - if your money as franchise grantor (the ARU) totally props up and sustains the economic survival and solvency of the franchisee the franchisees are NOT 'independent entities' in any honest and legally valid sense of the term 'independent'. You control them, you can make them better, you can ensure their boards and coaches and CEOs are of the requisite competency;
in fact, that is what you must do in order to honour your duties as capital and solvency provider to these parties with responsibility for the entire code's health across the board.
But note: the ARU have never acted upon this constructively intrusive principle, rather it has negligently let the State RUs routinely degrade themselves into positions of reckless mediocrity.
Witness the many poor HCs and CEOs the ARU has blithely permitted the State RUs to commit to their own little (highly predictable) suicides only to be followed by large ARU 'oh dear' bail outs using $ capital that should have instead gone to build the code, not crisis-manage it for surely short-term survival needs. Why are the Force and Rebels really in trouble - principally because their elite coaching and business management has never been up to the standards required to build them properly, and now the piper is being paid.
So, despite being totally dependent upon the ARU for their livelihood, remarkably the children State RUs get to vote on and in effect control who is on the board of the parent, namely the ARU that every year hands them their economic survival mechanism! Thus the parent board members know full well if they over-confront and upset the State RU boards they could be voted out of their 'prestigious' ARU board positions and thus be very publicly 'embarassed', 'humiliated' even in the ANZ Stadium corporate-boxes-world so dear to their ego-emblazoned hearts.
The whole set-up is ludicrous and it's wholly clear therefore why there has been no substantive reform of the entire Australian rugby governance edifice for decades and why the 'good rugby men' we all come to know have as their glaring consequence a state of institutional being such
that no senior party within the Australian rugby governance elite is ever truly responsible and accountable in a meaningful form for any action or any policy or any calibre of personal leadership.
Because accountability is not what the entire system is based upon; rather it is based upon self-preservation and a kind of sick continuity of habitual conduct as to how mediocrity is inferentially endorsed and protected as the enduring and unreformed MO of the whole.
Then we have the equally toxic flip-side. In any discussion re the conversion of the entire Australian rugby system into a local version of the indubitably more successful NZ one with its intelligent centralisation of costs and quality of player and team development, well of course the critical, core reasons why this notion has never gained any traction in the Australian rugby system are that:
(a) the alleged 'independent State RU entities' of course value their invulnerable, non-accountable, non-responsible 'prestige' roles and VIP boxes and so forth but (and this is far more valid and legitimate) and the ARU tolerates this obvious professional negligence for its own indefensible reasons
(b) because (via the above MO's inherent attributes and values) the ARU does not possess and never has, not even vaguely close, the proper calibre of executives, both business and rugby-technical, essential to undertake a centralising mission (and related policy formulations and enforcements) of the kind that the NZRU has so competently deployed and, to its great credit, continued to enhance over many years and especially since the 2007 RWC AB loss.
The ARU cannot even vaguely competently deal with the decision-making around which S18 team to drop, let alone how to design and lead, for example, the centralisation of player recruitment, development and judicious allocation, the centralisation of critical skills programs, the centralisation of code ticketing and marketing, the centralisation of elite coach development and allocation, and such like.
To fix (b), the State RUs accurately know that the ARU would have to be massively reformed and heavily skills-upgraded. Blind Freddy can see that they are right. But the crucial point is that, as argued above and totally evidenced by the relevant State RU boards' course of actual conduct, for self-preservation-related reasons, in no way do these State RUs want to commit a form of enlightened suicide and help the ARU become the calibre of entity it needs to be to meaningfully begin to restore the code's fortunes in Australia.
So, we see so painfully yet so clearly, how the cycle of mutual assured destruction via mutually assured insularity and mutually assured low competency of the State RUs and the ARU in unison has led to an irreversible death spiral we have now almost certainly entered.
The sustained deep deficiencies in the long-standing institutional model as practiced by the ARU and its supplicants, the State RUs, has 'killed the caring' of the very community that trusted in these bodies to give them something they so longed to care for, and with good reason as they played the game in their formative youth with joy and heart, or laughed with pride and pleasure as their 10 year son or daughter came home that special winter's day and declared 'I just can't wait for next week's game Dad (or Mum), I really love it'.
These fans and adherents rightly trusted in their elites to do so much better on their behalf than they have. In that reasonable hope, they have been betrayed.
